The Bridge (13 page)

Margaret and Gerard had been classmates in parochial school and had dated during and after their years in high school, although
"dating" in those days in that neighborhood hardly connoted sexual permissiveness. Had Gerard not fallen off the bridge, Margaret
would have been his virgin bride, perhaps among the last women of her generation in Red Hook to be so determinedly inclined
regarding premarital chastity; and yet along with her firmly held opinions on delayed gratification and the sanctity of marriage,
and her feelings of appreciation and tenderness toward Gerard for supporting and respecting her views, she doubted that she
would have been very happy as Gerard's wife.

She told me this during an interview in her home seven weeks after Gerard's funeral, which had been attended by hundreds of
fellow bridge workers. These men were the
only
individuals that Gerard looked up to, she said; they mattered more to him than any girlfriend or wife ever would. He sought
acceptance not only in an all-male world, she suggested, but in a brotherhood of chance takers who bonded together like the
steel they connected; and even after their day's work was done, they continued their camaraderie in bars as they talked about
the job and exchanged jokes and bragged about themselves and one another, all the while drinking beer and taking their own
sweet time about returning to their homes.

Still, had Gerard lived, and despite her reservations about their compatibility, she said she would have proceeded with their
marital plans. It would have been scandalous not to do so. The wedding date had been announced, their union was a fait accompli
as far as their kinfolk and friends were concerned. She was a product of a traditional Italian-American family, obedient if
at times uncertain. She did not know exactly what she wanted, but she did not want exactly what she had. In 1967, four years
after her fiance's death, Alargaret Nucito married a man from outside her neighborhood who in no way reminded her of the late
Gerard McKee. He ran a home appliance shop that specialized in selling refrigerators and washing machines, he catered mostly
to women, and he was comfortable in their presence.

Another person associated with Gerard McKee that I interviewed during the summer of 2002 was Edward Iannielli, now sixty-seven,
but a grieving man of twenty-seven when I first met him in 1963, weeks after he had briefly clung to, and then lost hold of,
the two-hundred-pound body of his doomed coworker. Following the funeral, and haunted by the experience of Gerard's death,
Edward Iannielli resumed working on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge until it was completed in 1964. In the years that followed,
he was engaged in the construction of about fifty high-rise office buildings in the metropolitan area, and other projects
as well, until he decided to retire in 1991. A religious man who regularly attends Mass and believes that everyday events
are instilled with a special meaning, he interpreted it as inevitable that he would cap his thirty-six-year career by ending
up on the Verrazano, joining forty fellow workers for three months, from the middle of the summer through the fall of 1991
in the task of removing rust from the towers and cables that, along with old memories of sadness, brought him renewed feelings
of personal pride and professional achievement.

He was fifty-five years old when he returned to work on the bridge. His back was in pain, he suffered from sciatica, and his
left hand had a missing index finger, a permanently bent middle finger, and a fourth finger cut off at the knuckle, all the
result of work-related accidents. He wore his faded brown hard hat, his much-traveled tool belt, his blue jeans, and one of
the rather gaudy tropical shirts he liked to wear even in cooler weather. He also wore a new, expensive pair of calf-high
soft leather boots with rubber soles and no heels, boots he fondly regarded as stumble-proof good-luck boots, the last pair
he would ever wear while traversing the beam of a bridge.

Despite his advanced age and his occupational ailments, Edward Iannielli had drawn one of the more difficult assignments on
the bridge, that of removing rust from the highest points of the towers. His height (five feet seven inches) and his weight
(one hundred and forty pounds) meant that he would not put undue stress on the quarter-inch galvanized cable wire that would
carry him more than six hundred feet to the tower tops.

On a particular morning, Iannielli stepped out onto the lower ledge of the tower on the Brooklyn side, overlooking the upper
deck of the roadway, two hundred feet above the water, and he eased himself down into a squarish silver metal container that
was attached to a cable; with his right hand holding onto the rail of the container, he used his left hand to press the "up"
lever that activated the electrical motor lodged in the base of the container, directly beneath his floor space. When he arrived
at the top, which took him twenty minutes, his job was to lean out and use wire brushes and scrapers to remove the rust, and
then, wearing rubber gloves, to smear a rust-resistant paste onto whatever corrosion existed along the flat surface and bolts
of the tower. As he did this he envisioned himself thirty years before inserting those same bolts into the same steel and
once more he felt an identity with the great structure. Tears came to his eyes as he continued to work, and, dipping his gloved
left hand into a bucket of reddish paste, he reached out to touch an untarnished plate of steel that was secured by a row
of bolts and with his bent middle finger he wrote as clearly as he could, in block letters, "Catherine"—the name of his wife
of thirty years, who had recently died of cancer.

From his vantage point he could see, extending for miles, the variegated shapes and shades of the city: the verdant parks
and tree-lined highways, the smokestacks, church steeples, row houses, apartment buildings, and skyscrapers—the taller they
were, the more familiar he was with them.

If helping to build the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge had been the most gratifying job of his life, and it was, then the low point
came during the years he was employed as a worker at the World Trade Center. It was never in his nature to be critical of
designers and engineers, and particularly so now that the World Trade Center building site has become a memorial shrine. However,
during the years he participated in its construction, beginning in 1968 and continuing through 1971, Iannielli and most of
the workers he was associated with were appalled by the lightness of the floor beams they were directed to connect, the lack
of interior support columns, the seeming fragility of the entire construction, and the hasty pace they were instructed to
follow in adding to the skyline of New York two tubular towers that suggested from afar a pair of elongated birdcages.

"Flimsy" was how Iannielli had characterized the formation of the World Trade Center in one of our interviews during the summer
of 2002. A day later he telephoned to say he regretted using the word, fearing it made him sound insensitive to the event
of September 11. But I reminded him that his feelings about the project's design and stratification had already been expressed
by several other workers I had spoken to, many of them Verrazano veterans. I also told him that "flimsy" had been used in
a speech delivered months before at Stanford University by Ronald O. Hamburger, a member of a team of structural engineers
assessing the performance of the World Trade Center during the terrorist attacks, the ensuing fires, and ultimately the demolition.
"The floor trusses were relatively flimsy . . . the trusses just fell apart," Mr. Hamburger said. It was pointed out by other
engineers that the World Trade Center buildings were about ninety percent "air," designed to achieve the utmost in rentable
floor space and flexibility, unencumbered by columns, explaining why the rubble in the wake of the collapse was only a few
stories high. "We didn't find much concrete in there," I was told by one hard-hatted worker who was among the unionists' volunteers
who removed the debris. "It was mostly powder, dust, mounds of dust."

In addition to the World Trade Center's design, its building standards, and possible flaws in its methods of fireproofing,
Edward Iannielli remembers his working days there as a dispiriting time, an era of conflict in which student antiwar demonstrators
and various counterculturists presumed to occupy the moral high ground in New York and elsewhere, while such hard-hatted unionists
as himself, patriotic traditionalists opposed to the desecration of the flag, were frequently depicted in the media as reactionary
goons and worse.

One day in early May of 1970, Iannielli recalled, a melee broke out near Wall Street between crowds of antiwar activists and
dozens of workers who had followed them there. Iannielli had not accompanied his angry coworkers, disinclined to inflict added
punishment on his body, but when they returned they told him that they had beaten up many demonstrators and had destroyed
countless antiwar banners. They had also stormed City Hall and forced Mayor John Lindsay to raise the flag on the roof to
full staff, displeasing the antiwar faction that had earlier convinced him to lower it in memory of the Kent State marchers
who had been killed by law enforcement authorities in Ohio earlier in the week.

"When I think of the World Trade Center I think of all the hostility, all the bad feelings that seemed to be built into it
from the very beginning," one of Iannielli's coworkers told me. "We who had been on the job were as shocked and depressed
as everyone else by what happened to all those innocent people. But as for the buildings, well, we weren't so surprised they
went down the way they did."

Some among the five hundred steelworkers who had worked on the World Trade Center had come down to New York from the Indian
reservation of mixed-blood Mohawks located along the St. Lawrence River near Montreal; and the worker I most wanted to see
again was Danny Montour, an amusing and amiable individual who had befriended me in 1963 after I had met him working on the
Verrazano. During this time he had taken me up to the reservation to spend a weekend with his family, introducing me to his
wife, Lorraine, and others in his immediate and extended family, all the male members being bridge workers. His father had
died on the job in 1956, and his grandfather in 1907. When Danny Montour introduced me to his two-year-old son, Mark, Lorraine,
the boy's mother, expressed the hope that he would seek a different means of livelihood than his male kinfolk.

In the summer of 2002, I telephoned the Montour home and learned from Lorraine that Danny was dead. He had died in 1972 at
the age of thirty-four, she said, having fallen ten stories after a concrete ledge had crumbled under him when he was constructing
a hospital near JFK Airport in Queens. Their son, Mark, had attended Cornell University for a while, she said, but—"It's in
his blood"—he is currently employed with a crew that is erecting a skyscraper in Jersey City that will be completed in 2003.

When I contacted him on his cell phone, Mark Montour explained that he was talking to me while standing on a steel beam seven
hundred feet in the air, overlooking Ground Zero on the opposite side of the harbor and with a view of a dozen buildings that
his late father helped to build, including the Met Life Building, when it was called the Pan Am, and, of course, the Verrazano-Narrows
Bridge, which, even on cloudy days, he can clearly see.

APPENDIX